The key ideas

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

Daniel Amen, 1998

What if the problem is not a weak character but the way your brain is set up? Psychiatrist Daniel Amen uses brain scans to link anxiety, a short temper and the habit of getting stuck to the work of five brain systems, and he argues that much of it can be fixed without pills. This book retells his approach and says honestly where science disagrees with him.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of blaming themselves for anxiety, a short temper or endless putting off, who wants to know how much of it comes down to the brain. And for anyone curious about a famous, if disputed, doctor's view of the brain and behavior.

At 18 you worry about what other people think of you. At 40 you don't care what they think of you. At 60 you realize that nobody was really thinking about you at all.

What this book is about

You snap at the people you love, leave important things until the last minute, or spend hours replaying the same hurt in your head, and you think: that's just my character. Daniel Amen, a doctor and psychiatrist, offers another explanation. In his model, the problem is often not willpower or character but how your brain is working at that moment.

Amen founded a chain of clinics that look at the brain through a special kind of scan, and over the years he has built a huge collection of these images. From them he links particular brain areas to particular struggles: anxiety, a short temper, getting stuck on thoughts, low mood. This book retells his approach: how he describes five brain systems, why blaming yourself for your "character" is often unfair, and what, in his experience, you can do without pills. To be honest from the start: Amen's method is controversial, and further on we will say what academic science thinks of it. If you opened a book about the brain to understand yourself rather than to judge yourself, that is already the right step.

Idea 1. It's not your character, it's how your brain works

Amen's main idea goes like this: a person's behavior is shaped less by the person and more by the state of their brain. If some area works too sluggishly or too intensely, it shows up in mood, attention and actions. The state of the brain drives behavior, and that is his starting point.

To see this, Amen uses SPECT, single-photon emission computed tomography, a scan that shows how active different areas of the brain are. From the scans he describes five systems: the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate gyrus, the deep limbic system, the basal ganglia and the temporal lobes. He links each one to its own set of problems.

An important piece of context, and these are not Amen's words: academic psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association do not accept such scans as a way to make a psychiatric diagnosis or choose a treatment. His claims are considered unproven. So read everything that follows as one doctor's model, not as settled science.

Someone is late for the third time this week and calls himself lazy. In fact he simply finds it hard to hold a plan in his head and switch tasks on time. It feels like a character trait, but what is at work here is a very specific mechanism of attention.

When you see your slips as the work of an organ rather than a verdict on yourself, you gain something the label "that's just how I am" never gives you: the sense that it can change.

Read in Livria

About the author

Daniel Amen is an American psychiatrist and the founder of a chain of clinics that holds one of the largest collections of brain scans. He writes popular books on the brain and behavior; his method is well known and, at the same time, disputed by his colleagues.

All books by this author: Daniel Amen

Terms from the book

  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Basal ganglia
  • SPECT: A brain imaging method that shows how active different areas of the brain are. Amen builds his approach on it, but official medicine does not recommend using it for psychiatric diagnoses.
  • single-photon emission computed tomography: The full name of SPECT. It shows blood flow and the activity of different parts of the brain.
  • anterior cingulate gyrus: An area of the brain that helps shift attention and stay flexible. By Amen's observations, its overactivity is linked to getting stuck on thoughts; this is his model, not a diagnosis.
  • deep limbic system: A group of deep brain structures involved in emotion and mood. For Amen it is the "emotional filter" of perception, an image from his model rather than a precise medical term.
  • temporal lobes: The side lobes of the brain, linked to memory, language and recognizing emotions in other people.
  • emotional filter: Amen's image: the deep limbic system as a filter through which the world looks mostly bright or mostly dark. It is a metaphor from his model, not a term.
  • automatic negative thoughts: Gloomy thoughts that arrive on their own and feel true. Amen suggests noticing and checking them; a related idea in psychology is cognitive distortions.
  • ANT: Short for automatic negative thought. It spells the word ant, which is where Amen's image comes from.
  • ants: Amen's image for automatic negative thoughts: one at a time they are harmless, but a whole colony poisons your mood.
  • diaphragmatic breathing: Slow breathing from the belly, with the exhale longer than the inhale. It helps lower anxiety felt in the body.
  • deadline: The final date or time by which a piece of work has to be finished.
  • psychiatry: The field of medicine that deals with mental disorders. Academic psychiatry does not accept brain scans as a way to make such diagnoses.
  • American Psychiatric Association: The professional association of psychiatrists in the United States, which publishes the DSM classification of mental disorders. It does not recommend brain scans for psychiatric diagnosis.

All terms

Similar books